DeDuper cleans up your iTunes library

For music fans, managing a large collection of MP3s is likely to leave you with a handful of problems: metadata that’s a mess; missing album art; and a library full of duplicate tracks that are hard to separate from the originals.

Since launching in 2008, San Francisco startup TuneUp has worked on the first two problems. This month, they introduced a solution to the third. DeDuper, which comes as a free upgrade to the company’s subscribers, analyzes your iTunes library and plucks out both confirmed duplicates and songs it merely suspects to be doubles. After reviewing the software’s selections, you can whisk duplicates away into a special folder. From there, it’s your call as to whether you want to delete them or move them somewhere else. It’s a painless process, and depending on the size of your music collection, it could free up hundreds of megabytes of space on your hard drive.

In Tech Chronicles testing, the software worked well, easily identifying more than a hundred duplicates from a library of more than 8,000 songs. The resulting disk space saved was north of 100MB, and the cleaned-up music collection inspired feelings of relief typically associated with having your home cleaned top to bottom by a maid service.

The only downside to the service is that it comes at a cost. TuneUp offers a limited free version, but to de-dupe more than 25 tracks you’ll have to pay. For $40 you can get a year’s worth of access to all of TuneUp services, which also include the metadata-scrubbing, album-art searching and a ‘Tuniverse’ feature that lets you know when your favorite artists are coming to town. For another $10 you can get a pass that extends for the lifetime of a single computer. Or you can pay $20 for individual access to the clean-up, cover-art and DeDuper features.

That may too pricey for those who don’t get heartburn over the thought of a mislabeled song or a second copy of “Freebird” crowding the hard drive. But if you like to keep your music library clean, TuneUp’s new product be just the janitor you’re looking for.